A month in Mongolia

Yes, we've been here a month now. That's a bit crazy. This post is not an attempt to recap the month though, just to talk about our weekend.

On Saturday we went out to try and buy some glasses. We walked through a ger district to get to the back entrance to the Black market. It was quite a warm day. Anyway there were no stalls at the market at all. Just lots of people cleaning. So that was odd. We then went to a nearby building that has lots of small stall-shops, and it too was similarly shut and lots of people cleaning. This was all very weird. We happened to be nearby a mission run cafe, so we went there and there was just the one guy working, Eric, who has been quite friendly. So then we enjoyed a lovely coffee and some chocolate-banana cake. Also Seumas was introduced to coffee cupping. Thanks to some texting with a Mongolian, we discovered that the Mayor of Ulaanbaatar had declared the day a cleaning day, so everybody was meant to be cleaning up and if not you could get fined for not beautifying your property or something. So everyone does it!


Today (Sunday) we went to our two churches. At the first service we had a visiting preacher from San Diego preach in Korean, which was translated into Mongolian (from the front), and then was translated into English for us as well. That was an interesting experience. Also we heard some encouraging reports from the mission teams that had travelled into one of Mongolia's neighbours.

At the international church we have volunteered to get involved in serving with music and service-type stuff. So Seumas played bass today, and Rachel joined in the singing practice as well.

A huge amount of dust came up in the afternoon. Spring is renowned for being very windy and quite dusty.

So those are some things that have been happening.